


A Slow Day in Engineering

by rattyjol



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen, Star Trek Friendshipfest, Time Shenanigans, don't look too closely at the science oh gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 08:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2185197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattyjol/pseuds/rattyjol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Janeway and B'Elanna return from a diplomatic mission to find the ship and crew frozen in time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Slow Day in Engineering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frith_in_thorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/gifts).



> This is a giftfic via the Star Trek Friendshipfest for frith_in_thorns, who requested (among other things) "bizarre ship malfunctions/spacial anomalies/nebulae" and "characters working together against danger (rather than large amounts of inter-character conflict)". I hope I have sufficiently met your expectations!
> 
> (As an aside, I don't use AO3 very often and tbh I'm not sure how gift fests work, and I turned this in a little late so I hope everything works out and I'm sorry whoops)

“They’re alive,” the captain confirmed, tucking the tricorder away. She reached out with some caution to touch the crewman’s wrist. “He’s warm,” she added. “But I can’t find a pulse.”

B’Elanna peered into the frozen face of another member of the crew, stuck in midstride with one foot off the ground. Their eyes were open and glassy, fixed on some distant point. She snapped her fingers in front of their nose, but there was no reaction.

The captain released the crewman’s wrist and stepped back, looking grim. She tapped her comm badge for the third time since they’d landed in the shuttle bay not ten minutes before. “Janeway to bridge.” Like the last two times, there was no response, just a faint hum on the other end.

“Any theories?” the captain asked, pacing around to view the two crew members from another angle.

“The comm could be any number of things— an EMP pulse, a system malfunction.” B’Elanna prodded fiercely at the wall panel, hoping it would acknowledge her commands this time. “But the crew? Biology isn’t exactly my field of expertise.”

“No, I suppose not.” Shrugging off her jacket, the captain picked up a pry bar leaning against the wall of the shuttle bay and advanced towards the door. “Let’s get this door open.”

The ship was eerily quiet, and B’Elanna felt that walking through the halls was like moving through a photograph, a frozen moment in the lives of the crew. They passed Ensigns Bryce and P’lar, who had spent the last few weeks unsuccessfully trying to keep their budding romance under wraps, caught with their hands just brushing as they passed in the corridor. Naomi Wildman had been skipping and now hung in the air, suspended only by Seven’s hand. It wasn’t until they passed Vorik, his head bent over a PADD, that B’Elanna realized why the silence was so disconcerting.

“Captain, the engines aren’t running.”

The captain nodded, a faint crease of worry in her brow. “You go down to engineering. I’ll check on the bridge— Wait.” B’Elanna paused as the captain tapped her comm badge again. “Janeway to Torres.” Her voice was echoed by the split-second lag on B’Elanna’s badge. “Good, we can talk to each other. I want you to check in every ten minutes.”

B’Elanna nodded. “Understood.”

Unsurprisingly, the turbolift down to engineering was also inoperable. The climb down the Jefferies tubes wasn’t bad— but, B’Elanna reflected, would probably be worse on the way back up.

Her engineering team was frozen like the rest of the crew, caught in various states of alert— some only just looking up from their stations, others suspended in the air, diving away from the explosion that took up the center of the room.

But unlike everything else on the ship, the smoky blast obscuring the warp core from view wasn’t still. It moved, slowly but perceptibly, creeping centimeter by centimeter across the room.

Before she could react, her comm badge pinged. “Janeway to Lieutenant Torres. I’ve figured it out. Time didn’t stop—“

“—It’s slowed. Captain, I think you’d better get down to engineering right away.”

By the time the captain crawled out of the Jefferies tube that opened into the engine room, B’Elanna had managed to move most of the crew out into the corridor. Taking in the situation at a glance, the captain grabbed the nearest engineer under the armpits and began to half-carry, half-drag him across the room.

“The core hasn’t fully breached yet,” B’Elanna explained, laying Ensign James down in the corridor. “The bulkheads will protect them from the initial blast. I’d guess an hour for us is around a second for them, so we have about six hours to contain the breach.”

The captain set down the man she’d been moving. “Could the breach be related to the time anomaly?”

“Hell of a coincidence if it’s not. Either the breach caused the anomaly or something else caused both. I can’t even tell the source of the breach without equipment.”

“Forget the anomaly for now. Can you fix it?”

B’Elanna eyed the warp core, trying to estimate the amount of damage already done. “Without a crew or equipment— I can try.”

The captain nodded approvingly. “Good. Let’s get to work. Where should we start?”

“We, Captain?”

Janeway smiled, her expression radiating confidence and calm. “You’re not entirely without crew, Lieutenant. Consider me at your disposal.”

B’Elanna took a breath and nodded sharply. “Right. Let’s start by stabilizing the warp field.”

*

Four hours of work, and they were no closer to isolating the cause of the breach than they had been at the start. The crew outside had had just enough time to begin reacting to their seemingly instantaneous scenery change, their faces now shifted into what in any other circumstance would have been comically confused expressions.

“If the ship was dropping from warp to impulse just as the breach occurred, it could have knocked the ship out of sync with the temporal universe,” B’Elanna theorized, carefully splicing a resistor into the circuit she’d just cut. With the computers unable to keep up with their speed, her control was limited to just the physical components of the engine.

“With the temporal distortion dissipating, and a major impact at just the right moment . . .” The captain nodded in agreement, drumming her fingers on a computer console. “So another blast could knock the ship back into line with the temporal stream?”

“Theoretically. But bringing the ship back to normal time would only leave a few seconds before the core breach. The whole ship would be destroyed.”

“We’ll just have to fix the breach first, then.”

There was a pause as B’Elanna wrestled with her own stubborn pride. “Captain, if I can’t fix it in time . . . The shuttle should still work.”

The captain met and held her gaze, her mouth set in a grim line. “I won’t hold it against you if you want to leave, B’Elanna. But I won’t abandon my ship or my crew.”

If someone had told B’Elanna a few years ago, fighting for the Maquis, that one day she would gladly die for a Starfleet ship, crew and captain, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now— B’Elanna turned back to her work. “Then neither will I.”

* 

The initial blast had posed no danger to them, as it wasn’t difficult to avoid the slow-moving flame and shrapnel. But as the deadline ticked closer and the warp core began to overload, its heat started to make the whole side of the room unbearable. Soon they would have to leave engineering altogether, and it wouldn’t be long after that that the breach would be irreparable. They would slowly cook to death, but at least they wouldn’t be around long enough to watch _Voyager_ torn apart around them.

B’Elanna glanced out into the corridor, where the captain was pacing with a working PADD from the shuttle. Humans had a lower tolerance to heat than Klingons did, and rank or no B’Elanna had forcibly evicted the captain once she could no longer stand upright in the heat. _Voyager_ may have been Janeway’s ship, but the engine room was still B’Elanna’s domain.

“B’Elanna,” the captain said suddenly, marching back into the heat. “Will the impact of the core breach knock _Voyager_ back into normal time?”

B’Elanna nodded slowly, sweat trickling down the back of her neck. The heat was making it hard to think. “It’s likely. But it won’t do any good. The ship will still be destroyed.”

“Is it possible to control the blast in such a way to put her back in normal time a few moments before the initial explosion?”

B’Elanna paused, her mouth half open, her mind clearing as the calculations ran in her head. She couldn’t stop the breach, but she could control it. “It’s possible. I can’t guarantee it will work, but if I can—“ Heat all but forgotten, she moved to the nearest wall panel and began tearing at wires with a fervor, new strength pouring into her limbs. She moved on to the next panel, blueprints reeling through her brain, the ideas racing ahead of her hands—

She stopped and turned to the captain, who had one hand braced against the wall for support. Seeing B’Elanna’s expression, she shifted to stand upright.

“What is it?”

“We’ll have to take the shuttle. We’re still in sync with the timestream; if we’re here during the blast there’s no chance at all. But if it doesn’t work . . . “

Janeway smiled at her, looking more optimistic than she had since hour three. “Do what you have to do. It’ll work.”

By the time B’Elanna had finished, they only had about fifteen minutes to reach the shuttle and get out of the blast range. Lightheaded from the heat, and with sweaty hands slipping on the ladders in the Jefferies tubes, the climb out was hard going. But Janeway kept moving, and B’Elanna followed.

Though she’d been expecting it, it was almost comforting to use the working computer in the shuttle, the buttons reacting as they should under her hands. She inputted the data she’d estimated from the engines as the captain deftly piloted the shuttle out of the bay and back into open space.

“Computer,” B’Elanna said when she’d finished, “estimate odds of _Voyager_ survival based on given data.”

“Odds of _Voyager_ survival cannot be computed from given data,” the computer deadpanned. “Please input further data.”

“How much time until core breach?”

“Core breach will occur in three minutes, fifty-seven seconds.”

“Computer, show _Voyager_ on viewscreen,” the captain said, her voice taut. She glanced at B’Elanna, who nodded.

The ship appeared in front of them, bright against the darkness of space. Just another in a long line of homes to go up in smoke, B’Elanna thought numbly. Her father, her mother, Starfleet Academy, the Maquis . . . and now _Voyager_ and all its crew. Most of its crew.

Janeway’s eyes were fixed on the ship, her face like stone. Before she knew what she was doing, B’Elanna had reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing it tight and letting its warmth anchor her to the here and now, to the knowledge that there was still a chance the ship could survive, and that even if it didn’t, there would still be someone at her side. She felt Janeway squeeze back, and together they watched.

The ship exploded into terrible white light— and then froze.

Just for a split second, the light seemed to stop. And then it retreated, sucked back into the cracks in the hull as if someone was playing a holo-recording backwards. And just like that, the ship was whole again.

The comm system pinged.

“This is _Voyager_ to Shuttlecraft One,” came Chakotay’s voice. “Welcome back. Prepare for docking.”


End file.
